Parliamentary Government in England Government's view that the Budget of 1909 should not be amended or rejected by the Lords, We must not minimize the significance of this attitude. It is the argument that the Lords are entitled to protect the status quo in economic (or other matters) for two years, and that if a Government of the Left seeks an important alteration in it, it must consult the country. If it asks for the right to create peers, the King must refuse to concede it. In doing so, he acts as the "guardian of the Consti- tution." The theory which underlies this argument is, therefore, that the Parliament Act (intended, as its preamble states, as a temporary measure) has become a kind of fundamental law the procedure of which the King must safeguard at all costs. Professor Keith does not point out that, reform of the House of Lords apart, this is to apply one form of procedure to measures from Right Governments and another to those of the Left. In that procedure, moreover, the King is in effect to make him- self the guardian of the economic interests represented by the Conservative Party in the House of Lords, He is to assure himself that the country definitely wants the measures of a Labour Government; his doubts on this head are to be aroused by their rejection in the House of Lords. But he has no need for such an assurance in the case of Conservative measures. He may assume, we are to infer, that they do not traverse the "essentials" of the Constitution, however drastic they may be, so long as they are not rejected by the Lords. For we must be clear that the King will not view Conservative legislation as he views that of a Labour Government. George V did not, for instance, urge on Lord Baldwin that the electorate ought to be consulted before the passage of the Trade Union Law Amendment Act of 1927, though that drastic statute reversed the 426